House with Charismatic Color

Short of bottling Manhattan Beach’s California sunshine and bringing it with her to Minneapolis, Dana Alpeter did the next best thing. She and her husband, Steve, renovated a 1934 home in a gracious Edina neighborhood for an indoor-outdoor lifestyle full of snap, crackle, and color all but foreign to the upper Midwest. “The open, light, bright feel of a California beach house was the one thing we couldn’t leave behind,” Dana declares.

Both Dana and Steve spotted their 1934 house’s potential immediately. First, the property offered opportunity to create amazing outdoor spaces. Spanning three city lots, it lent itself to gorgeous gardens, a pergola, a pool and cabana, a big garage, a stone fireplace, a patio, and even a guesthouse—all crafted, where appropriate, of stone (salvaged from an old church) nearly identical to the original and using masonry techniques undetectable from those employed in the 1930s.

The family room shown here is an addition. Its six sets of French doors create an airy California look, and the coffered ceiling suggests the architectural style of the home’s original construction.

Color runs cheek-by-jowl with indoor-outdoor features in the home’s decorating hierarchy. “The interior needed strong color to stay balanced with the heavy stone exterior. Vibrant color also helps with mood during the long winters here,” notes the recovering Californian. Her bold palette—brilliant fuchsia, gold, citron green, and even orange—was preexisting, just awaiting discovery. “My inspiration was the living room’s original stained-glass windows. They were perfect because the house needed assertive color,” Dana observes. The strong colors are introduced in the window treatments and furniture upholsteries, while backgrounds—ebony-finished wood and white marble floors and stark, white plaster walls—remain neutral but dramatic. “One of the things Debbie and I worked so well together on was flow—using colors with the same intensity in different rooms and grounding them with the ebony floors.”

Framed by an archway to the living room, the sexy lipstick hue of the dining-room chairs is an amplification of the fuchsia accents in the living room. With every public room opening through archways onto the next, sustaining the color flow was a matter of crescendo and diminuendo, technique being everything. Fuchsia and gold dominate in the living room, supplanted by citron green and orange in the kitchen and yellow/green in the family room. Upstairs offers a respite, melting into creamy neutrals.

“The kitchen is the most important room to me,” confides Dana. “I wanted it to have the openness of an English conservatory but with a Lacanche range [imported from France] and a kitchen sink where I could stand and be a part of family and guests and still see the arbor outside.” Six pairs of French doors and a breakfast bay provided the transparency Dana desired.

Looking out at the pool and the nearby guesthouse, the family room-kitchen addition and its accompanying new upstairs master suite embrace the outdoors with multiple French doors and small-paned windows.